While your personal anecdote may vary, my personal anecdote does seem to indicate that tech is a pretty meritocracy directed industry. Maybe this is a Silicon Valley / CA trait given thing like non-compete clauses being non-enforceable.

Tech is often more of a meritocracy than other fields/industries.

It is quite possible for a talented engineer to rise quickly out of university but nearly impossible for a talented surgeon or industrial engineer without a decade+ of effort.

The tech industry has a bias for youth, which is mutually exclusive with experience. I don't know much about the medical industry, but I wager surgeons face less ageism once the gray hairs start coming in. With that age comes experience younger surgeons simply couldn't have.

Maybe that makes them better surgeons, or maybe not. But it seems to me that ageism in tech complicates comparisons to fields which value experience instead of youth.

My point was that the OPPOSITE is true in most other fields.

If you don't have grey hairs, you simply are not considered for the top jobs at all in certain industries. YOE (years of experience) is nearly everything for some professions, tech is surprisingly quite robust in that regard.

Tech is more like "reverse ageist" instead of being egalitarian.

Personally, I would be more amenable to a statement like "tech is not an absolute meritocracy". Many industries are however, roughly meritocratic. While talent may not be perfectly recognized or rewarded, it often eventually is - simply because it makes good business sense. When you have easy to recognize signals of merit and value, like in the tech industry where work can be more objectively evaluated, it makes it easier to implement a meritocratic culture.